WHO YOU CALLIN’ SHRIMP?

Buddhists believe in the wholesale “mercy release” of living creatures, with smaller and less consequential animals making even stronger statements of reverence, according to a July New York Times story from Yushu, China, describing the freeing of river shrimp the size of a fingernail clipping. These specks of life, an advocate said, “could very well be the reincarnated souls of relatives” who perished in the 2010 earthquake that demolished the local area. “We” workers, said another, “have the same feelings as the fish,” alluding to his own occupation of “digging in the mud.”